Happiness and Joy

We talk a lot in meetings about both happiness and joy, but we often fail to distinguish the two.  I hear a lot of people telling their stories saying things like "I could never be happy but now, in AA, I am."  I can understand not being able to experience much, if any happiness while drinking, especially in the later stages of alcoholism.  But being happy, while certainly not a bad thing, is not the point.  Happiness is bestowed by the world and like other things bestowed by the world (power, wealth, popularity...) it is transitory.  Circumstances can give it and circumstances can take it away.

Acceptance and Love

I'm reading Kevin Griffin's A Burning Desire: Dharma God and the Path of Recovery.  He refers to acceptance as nonresistance to truth, and as such an aspect of love.
Now, let's get clear from the start:  acceptance is not approval.

Neither Angel nor Beast

We who so often demand the truth from others, and call them on their hypocrisy have built layers of distortions (lies) of our true nature – the nature of an active alcoholic. It is in these lies of who we think we are, this mangled self image that our insanity dwells. Simultaneously we are the dictator of our world, victim of every conceivable circumstance, the most worthy of all praise, and the most unworthy of the smallest compliment. Let us not forget our coping skill to deal with this: ‘more’. We come to AA in this state, and it is in this state our “isms” lay; this systemic part of our psyche that demands extremes and cannot cope with the concept of balance. The truth is we come to AA not to get sober but to cope with sobriety and cope with ourselves in a most unnatural state of being sober. For many, if not all of us, were to be without AA, a dry drunk would be around the corner, and I can easily be persuaded that a dry drunk is as bad as a wet one (and sometimes worse). It is in our ‘isms’ that we find this perverse craving for chaos and misery. Our isms demand comfort at the expense of stability and happiness.

Fellowship

This morning at my home group we had a discussion about the Fellowship.  It was good to be reminded of what a special thing an AA group is.  People who have never felt a part of anything feel accepted.  People who are afraid of just about everything in life feel safe.  People feel comfortable talking about things they would virtually never discuss elsewhere.  People know they have somewhere to go for help, that every person in that room wants what is best for them.  It's amazing how you can bump into a fellow AA, someone you've maybe had a few chats with, sit down for a cup of coffee and very quickly begin talking about what is really happening in your lives, what you are happy about, what you are afraid of, and all at a level of reality you almost never reach with non-alcoholics.

It is just plain nice.

Why all this 'practical polytheism', gods/Higher Powers vs idols/Lower Powers stuff?

If you have read any of my recent postings, you've seen that I have been making a lot of use of the idea that people are 'practical polytheists', worshiping multiple gods or Higher Powers and idols or Lower Powers. Among the Higher Powers people worship are God, community, justice, love... and among the Lower Powers/idols one could find money, power, praise, possessions.... Why do I find this approach useful, rather than just sticking with virtues and vices or character assets and character defects?

Our lives become prayer

I have mentioned in some of my comments on the Second and Third Steps that I think that it is useful to view people as 'practical polytheists', that is to say, in our practical, daily lives we in fact worship many Higher Powers, what I refer to as Gods and Idols, but many might prefer to call Higher and Lower Powers. In other words, we value, follow, even worship and pray to many things that we are powerless over, both positive and negative. Some examples would be the economy, others' opinions of us, our jobs, money, justice, peace, love, security....the list goes on and on and differs from person to person.

Check Your Motivations

When I was in early sobriety I went through times, like most people, where I was full of confusion and indecision. I was unsure of about how to act in certain situations, where I could safely go, and which of my old friends I could spend time with without being in danger. I was given a pretty standard prescription from some old timers: "Dave, just check your motivations. You'll know pretty quickly whether or not you should go there." It seemed simple enough to do, except I couldn't quite get the hang of it. After years of Step work I now know why.

Bill's Boomerang

Every Thursday my home group discusses a reading from As Bill Sees It. This week we read "Boomerang" on page 185, where Bill describes how after his grandfather told him no-one but Australian Bushmen knew how to make and throw boomerangs he resolved to be the first American to do it. He worked at it for 6 months and finally succeeded.
What strikes me about the story is that Bill had no real interest in boomerangs, only in the attention and glory that would result from making and throwing one.

Love and the Fourth Step

There is a fascinating article, The Rigor of Love, by Simon Critchley in the August 9 New York Times. The essay is about the question of whether non-believers in a transcendent God can have faith. I will probably deal with his central concern in a later post but for today I'd like to think about one of the stepping stones he uses to get to his conclusion: Soren Kierkegaard's (Danish philosopher, 1813 - 1855) concept of Christian Love.

Being restored to sanity

When I was in early sobriety and trying to worrk the Steps for the first time in my life, I came face to face with Step 2. It took me months to navigate this mine field. In my mind there was no way I go on until I was willing to believe there even was a God.

Now mind you, everyone in AA was telling me I was trying to take off a much bigger bite than this Step requires. But nothing doing, I was going to "do it right dammit!". My problems were obviously bigger than my God at that time.

The 'innate violence' of modern life and the Third Step

A friend was telling me yesterday about how she felt overwhelmed by various forces in her life pulling her in a hundred different directions. She had so many things she had to do that she couldn't do anything. The resulting feeling of what I guess you could call besieged impotence had her parking in front of a liquor store, trying to decide whether to go in or to call another alkie. Luckily, she made the right decision. (Anyone wondering what the right decision was really needs to go to a meeting.)
One of the methods of execution used in medieval England was to tie the limbs of the victim to four horses and have them tear him apart. Our lives, or at least my life, can feel that way and it certainly seems like a good metaphor for what my friend was going through. I think I'm safe in saying that it's one of the worst feelings we regularly experience in today's world.

Two Spiritualities

In Finding God in All Things William Barry quotes John MacMurray as follows:

All religion...is concerned to overcome fear. We can distinguish real religion from unreal by contrasting their formulae for dealing with negative motivation. The maxim of illusory religion runs: "Fear not; trust in God and he will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you"; that of real religion, on the contrary, is "Fear not; the things that you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of."

I think this is a brilliant distinction and one that applies to some of the types of spiritualities we hear people express in meetings.